Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) and personal video recorders (PVRs) allow viewers to record video in a digital format to a disk drive or other type of storage medium for later playback. DVRs are often incorporated into set-top boxes for satellite and cable television services. A television program stored on a set-top box allows a viewer to perform time shifting functions, and may additionally allow a viewer to skip over commercial breaks and other portions of the recording that the viewer does not desire to watch. However, the user performs this function manually, for example, using a fast forward button of a remote control associated with the DVR. This manual fast forwarding is an inconvenience for the user. Further, manual fast forwarding by a user often leads to inaccurate results, because the user may fast forward past portions of the recording they desire to watch, or may resume playback during the portion of the recording that they want to skip over.
A number of techniques for automatically skipping over commercial breaks have been investigated and developed. One known technique relies on markers or tags embedded within the video stream data itself. Other approaches rely on closed captioning data to identify segment boundaries of interest. Such conventional techniques, however, may not be suitable for deployment across multiple time zones and across multiple DMAs, because closed captioning timing may vary from one DMA to another, because the commercials may differ from one DMA to another, because the timing of commercial breaks may differ from one time zone to another.